Compact discs (CDs) have been and continue to be the primary way that people transport, share, and listen to music. As digital music becomes more and more popular, digital music users will be able to use digital music players and the Internet to accomplish these tasks. However, as broadband connections still represent a small percentage of households, CDs will continue to be an easy, low cost alternative.
In recent years, hardware for copying CDs, termed “CD burners”, have become a popular way for people to transfer their digital music from a computer, such as a personal computer that contains their music library, to a portable CD. CD burners include a CD drive and hardware that enables digital data to be written to a CD that is inserted into the drive. So, to transfer songs from a computer to a new CD, a user need simply insert a blank CD into an appropriately configured CD drive and utilize a software application on their computer to initiate copying of the songs. In the past, however, the user experience provided by the CD burning systems has not been all that it could be. This stems from the fact that the means by which the CD burning functionality is accessed is not one that lends itself to a robust user experience. As an example, consider FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 illustrates a typical system that has enabled CD burning in the past. This system includes a media player application 100 through which a user interfaces with media on their computer. Typically, to burn CDs, the media player application launches a third party burning application 102 which installs its own layer of software 104. Layer 104 communicates with the hardware drive 106 to facilitate burning. In this scenario, after media player application 100 launches the third party burning application 102, it is no longer involved in the burning process. This is undesirable for a number of different reasons.
For example, the FIG. 1 scenario typically does not provide the user with meaningful and timely information or feedback on the progress and status of the CD burning process. For example, in the past, if the user selected a playlist of songs to burn to the CD and the list was too long, the user would not discover this information until after the third party application received the playlist and attempted to burn it to the CD. The third party application would typically generate an error message which would then cause the user to go back and shorten their playlist. This, however, took place after the user believed that they had initiated the burning process. So, for example, if the user initiated the burning process and left the computer, they would not know that the songs had not been transferred until they returned to the computer.
Additionally, because of the loose association of media player application 100 and third party burning application 102, the media player application typically does not know whether there is a CD drive with burning capabilities on its associated machine. The result of this is that the media player application will appear to the user as if it supports burning capabilities when, in fact, it does not. The media player application then relies on the third party burning application to generate an error message when the user attempts to burn a CD on a system that does not in fact support burning.
Thus, in the past, systems for burning CDs have not provided a user experience that is as desirable as it might be. Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing improved systems and methods for burning CDs and particularly, those that greatly enhance the user's burning experience.